Question for Pierce Harlan, the guy behind the False Rape Society blog: Do you really think this is the best way to fight false rape allegations?
The real problem here isn’t that he’s recycled an old rape joke; it’s that he’s pretending that rapists are somehow a species apart from ordinary men. His big complaint is that the PSA in question “passes off a criminal deviant as a typical guy.”
Pierce, what do you think rapists look like? They’re not villains out of some silent-movie melodrama, twirling their whiskers and cackling with glee. They don’t have giant R’s tattooed on their foreheads. No, they look like “ordinary” guys. Exactly like them. Rape prevention — and crime prevention in general — would be a lot more effective if criminals could be easily identified at a glance. But the world doesn’t work that way. Most criminals look pretty ordinary, actually.
But the problem with Harlan’s stance here go beyond that. The fact is that most rapists aren’t sinister strangers hiding in an alleyway; the overwhelming majority – something like 70% — are people known to their victims. As someone who writes regularly about rape, Pierce is presumably aware of this, which means either that he’s being completely disingenuous, or that he’s simply pretending that date rape (and non-stranger rape in general) doesn’t exist.
The PSA in question is far from perfect. Aside from the terrible acting, the main problem with it is that it it’s victim-blaming. Its depiction of a rapist as an ordinary-looking guy – and a friend of the victim — is the one thing it gets right.
To get an idea of the sort of person who reads (and agrees with) The False Rape Society blog, here are a couple of comments on the, er, “controversy.”
Here’s a comment from YouTube, posted by someone who obviously got there from Harlan’s blog (it appeared after the video was linked at the FRS; before the recent batch of comments, the video hadn’t had a comment for three years).
So the message is that if a guy is being helpful at a party, he’s probably a rapist? This is not a fair psa. It did better than some though, by highlighting the fact that the female friend ditched her.
Apparently, in this guy’s mind, trying to remove the clothes of a woman almost completely incapacitated by alcohol is just a way of being “helpful.”
Meanwhile, on the FRS blog itself:
Anonymous said…
Wow- just like TV- apparently the only people on earth who ever do ANYTHING wrong are white males- preferably fat ones to give feminists a little extra to hate.
While we’re on the subject of false accusations, here’s a strange bit of paranoid word-salad on the subject that I ran across recently from a Reddit Men’s Rightser.
Is it really possible that anyone – including the author and the people upvoting the comment — could actually believe this nonsense? If so, what a strange, sad world they must live in.
EDITED TO ADD: Holly Pervocracy just wrote a great and highly relevant post on what she calls “Slavering Beast Theory.” As she explains:
In the Slavering Beast Theory, there are two kinds of men. Two species, nearly. … There are ordinary guys and there are Slavering Beasts. And they are very, very easy to tell apart. They act different, even look different, to the point where any adult should be able to distinguish them in any casual social setting. …
This dichotomy is how someone can simultaneously believe that women shouldn’t go out after dark because rape is such a big problem and believe that tons of rape accusations are false. It makes perfect sense if you believe there are Slavering Beasts out in the dark, but if an ordinary guy is accused of rape, there must be more to the story. It explains why people are angered by rape prevention tips aimed at men–those are insulting to ordinary guys, and Slavering Beasts won’t listen. And it justifies the belief that abuse victims had it coming: either they were abused by a Slavering Beast and should have known better, or they were abused by an ordinary guy and must have done something terrible to provoke him.
NWO, what proportion of male rape survivors (ehem, “accusers”) do you figure are lying about it?
I mean, there’s all sorts of reasons a man could lie about rape. Money. Homophobia. Inside or outside of prison, to get rid of an enemy. There’s motive–so do you think men lie about rape?
(Then we could get into what motives a man could possibly have for claiming to not have raped someone, and we’re very close to the magical enlightenment of “sometimes people who committed crimes say they didn’t commit those crimes.”)
NWO, every time you say “other people having opinions is slavery!”, the less that word means anything at all. I wonder if you even know about the traditional definition of the word, the one where some people are actual non-metaphoric slaves who don’t get to whine about it on the Internet.
Uh….so wasn’t it Slavey who spoke of gays as bunch of sissy mangina feminist footsoldiers, or was that another one in our confederacy of dunces?
Now the story is that they are ravenous ultra-masculine and powerful barbarians who don’t need pathetic and simpering distraction of women while exercising manful brutality at will?
Does that mean Slavey is hard as nails right now?
Now, now. Let’s not jump to conclusions.
He also thanked David for posting “Flowers on the Wall” that one time, and said that he enjoyed it. I don’t think NWOSlave enjoys anything. DKM wants a fluffy little slave-robot he can pretend to love, and he says that life’ll make him happy. NWOSlave grinds his demands that all women be enslaved out through gritted teeth. Even his wants pain him.
Meller is just an angry old man railing against the fact that the world isn’t like what he imagined it to be as a child. Slavey, on the other hand, is clearly somewhere on the Antisocial Personality Disorder index. It’s probably a good thing that he keeps himself busy ranting on blogs, or he’d be another Breivik in the making.
NWO,
That’s a silly argument. Unless you get the person who allegedly made the false accusation into court and try them you have no idea whether they are guilty or not and neither does anyone else. The only people who’s opinion actually matters is the jury. If someone who is not a member of the jury chooses to believe the accused, that’s their business, if they choose not to, also their business. Why is it any more reasonable to assume that she’s guilty than that she isn’t? Except for misogyny, I mean.
NWO, are you seriously arguing that women can’t be rapists?
I’m mostly just surprised that there is one case in NWOland in which men come off worse than women.
[Citation needed]
Citation needed]
There is the funny thing: no, it’s not how it works. If you are a judge or a member of a jury, or a cop (involved in the case), that doesn’t apply to you. And if you’re not any of that, it still not mean you should seek revenge or spit on the accused, or make zir life miserable. You just show humanity to a possibly traumatized person.
All anti-feminists and non feminists have the hobby of kicking puppies with babies and use kittens as toilet paper. What do you mean Zarat, citation needed? Not before more than half of all judges, cops, lawmakers, and the president of the USA are women. I’m not even asking feminists, which is a smaller subset of the population. OK, I’m even adding trans-gender males, non closeted gays and gender-queers.
A wonderful thought just struck me- all the misogynist blog posts and comments the MRA types make that excuse/deny/encourage rape would be great supporting evidence if they ever do rape someone. Carry on, assholes.
From what I hear, the Bergen police are well aware of the content of Eivind Berge’s blog (especially in the wake of Anders Behrin Breivik’s rampage), and I suspect that he’ll be automatically regarded as a possible suspect if there are any rapes anywhere near his vicinity with no leads pointing elsewhere.
In fact, given that Berge has openly championed the murder of policemen (and has frequently threatened to carry out just such a killing himself), and has exalted at the death of one of their colleagues, I imagine they’d be thrilled to have the opportunity to bring him in for questioning.